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SAT: Advice for Critical Reading

By Deepanjan Roy on Saturday, 14 July 2012 at 11:06

Hi, before you jump into my really long advice post I just want you to know that there is no one way
to succeed in SAT. Different strategies work for different people, and it's very possible that some
other advice might work much better for you. I encourage you to try out all the advice you receive
from different sources. This advice post is therefore not so much of an
advice-post-you-must-follow-religiously-to-succeed-in-SAT, but rather
things-I-did-to-get-760-in-critical-reading.

Also, some people are really natural at Critical Reading. I know a friend who got a perfect 800
without breaking a sweat. But then again, he was an avid reader and he has read more books than I
will ever read in my lifetime. I recommend you take a practice test and see how much you score. If
you're already scoring more than 700, I doubt this post would be of much help to you.

I apologize for the length.

Completing Sentences:

For vocabs, the best way to prepare is to start early. About a year or so before your exam. And get in
the habit of using a dictionary. Make a dictionary easily accessible everywhere. If you use a
smartphone, get a dictionary app that you can easily use (I used this one:
http://rapidshare.com/files/73259729/MsDict_Concise_Oxford_English_Dictionary.jar because it’s
one of the few that could run on my clunky old phone. If you find a better one, by all means use it.)
Get a dictionary extension or add-on on your web browser. Make absolutely sure that if you come
across a new word, you can access its meaning in less than 15 seconds. Realize that in English a lot
of words have more than one meaning, and make sure you understand which of meanings makes
sense in the context. Also, if you see a word you know but it just isn't making sense, look it up in a
dictionary. There is a very good chance that the word has a different meaning that you never knew.

Start reading books. If you have books you really like, you can reread them, now with a dictionary. I
remember I read all my Harry Potter books again, but this time instead of skipping over new words
and guessing their meanings, I looked up the meaning of every single new word I saw. I was startled
to find how incredibly many words I did not know. And start keeping a list of all the new words you
see. Keep a diary of new words. If a paper diary is too old-fashioned for you, write it down in your
smartphone. Make creative sentences with them. Write down the sentences with the words. If you
have a friend named Titin who can't stand dirty clothes, write down something like "Titin was so
fastidious today about getting her shoes dirty!" Whatever helps you to remember.
Start reading good articles on the internet. I loved to read the op-ed of New York Times. You can
read The Daily Star, The Reader's Digest, and some good blogs. Get in the habit of reading widely,
and get in the habit of looking up words (did you know that "look up" a word means to find a word in
a reference book or dictionary? A lot of words have very special meanings when used in a phrase;
look out for them.) Use sticky notes to stick tough words around in your room. Use the sticky notes
application in windows to put new words on your desktop so them you see them Every time you
minimize a window. Use flash cards. Draw pictures. Use colors. The third or fourth time you see a
word in an article, you will get a feeling about its personality and which rhetorical situation it's good
for. That's what you're trying to achieve here.

Start describing the world around you with the words you learn. Make a list of 5 words that is
troubling you and try to find these words in everything that you see for a couple of days. Your
teacher is loquacious. There was a cornucopia of cars in the roads. Students are remonstrating at
BUET. Try it. It's fun. When you do practice tests from the Official SAT Study Guide by Collegeboard,
circle any word you don't know: either in the completing passage section or in the comprehension
passages. Give these words max priority. Since these are the words used by Collegeboard, they are
most most most likely to show up on your exam.

I liked the "Word Smart I" and "Word Smart II" books by Princeton Review. It had some pretty cool
tips about how to remember words, and the example sentences were funny. Try learning roots of the
words. Every word has a history, and you will remember it much better if you know the etymology. A
lot of the complicated words are derived from relatively simple and everyday words. For example,
gubernatorial is derived from governor, and once you know that the word becomes so much easier
to remember. Seek out new and fun sources to learn words. Do you know about Sparknotes SAT
novels? http://www.sparknotes.com/satfiction/ Take a look. The Sparknotes website has some other
great stuff in there as well. Look around. Look around other places on the Internet. There are lots of
other cool sites that can help you learn new words in a fun way. Sign up for some word of the day
service on the Collegeboard website (or anywhere else.) They will send you one word every day and
it's much less intimidating to learn just one word every morning when you check your email.

Once in the while I would look through the Barron's hot prospect and high frequency word list and
the The Princeton Review's hit parade, and mark off words that I already know. As time went by, the
number of words that I don't know started to go down pretty fast, and about a month before the
exam, I just sat down and learned about the 150ish words that were left. Then there were the direct
hits words list, and by this time, there were very very few words on that list that I did not know, and I
went ahead and learned them. It took me about a couple of hours. Seriously, not much was left. And
3 days before the test, I went to the American center and picked up Barron's SAT 2400. This book
had a special vocabulary list that was intended for students only aiming for a perfect score. (And this
book also has some unique strategies aimed at people wanting to score really really high. You can
take a look. I couldn't find this book at nilkhet (maybe it's available now but I just couldn't find it.)
There's a copy at the American Center library.) After crossing off the words I know, I figured out that I
still had about 100 new words. So I spent the whole day learning those words. And when I said I
learned the words, I don't mean I read the words and their meanings aloud till I memorized them. I
dissected the words, looked at the roots to see if they relate to something I know already, wrote
down small memorable sentences whenever I could, tried to see if they rhymed with something
funny, drew pictures, went for lunch to have biriyani and tried to find the words in the world around
me, came back and found out which words were particularly troubling to remember, put them on a
special list, made flashcards with them, and played with those flashcards on my one-and-half-hour
ride back home. And there you go: I knew I had done all I could to prepare for the vocabs.

Even after you do all of these, there will inevitably be some words on the test that you just don't
know. That's fine; don't flip out. Cross out the options that you know are certainly wrong. (This
process has a fancy name - The Process of Elimination.) Among the ones that are left, pick the first
one, and move along. If two options are equally likely (for example you don't know the meaning of
either of them) do NOT waste time trying to "get a feeling" for which is right and deliberating and
questioning your choice. Pick the first one. You do not have time to waste.

Do not leave a question blank. Pick and option randomly but answer something. Let me show you
the math: You get -0.25 for every wrong answer, and +1.0 for every correct answer. Now on average,
by rules of probability, for every five question you guess, you are going to get one right answer and
four wrong answers, and your score will add up to a net 0. Now here's the best part: if you use the
process of elimination, you will more often find yourself stranded between two or three choices
instead of five. Let's say three. Now for every three questions, you will get one right and two wrong,
and your net gain is 1.0-0.25-0.25=+0.5. There's an even better part. Do you know that your raw
score gets rounded? That means if you get a 48.75 or 48.5, your score will be rounded up to 49.
Even if you make up to two incorrect guesses, you will not be penalized at all. All the subtracted
marks will just get rounded up.

[The only situation where it makes sense to leave a question blank is when you know with ruthless
confidence that you answered every other questions right except for two and you know that getting a
third question wrong would get your score to 48.25. If you know how the SAT score works, you
probably know that 48.25 gets rounded down to 48 instead of getting rounded up to 49. But there's
only a 25% possibility that your score will be rounded down, and from a probabilistic perspective, it's
still more logical to guess as long as you can't say for sure that you got EXACTLY two other
questions wrong.]
Another point about guessing that's extremely important: When I said "guess", I did not mean, "Hm,
well I have to choose between B, C, and E, but C just 'feels right.' Deepanjan told me to not leave a
question blank, so I'll just bubble in C." If you do this, you will most certainly get the question wrong.
The questions in SAT are designed very carefully so that the answer that "feels right" is very often
wrong. If you go by your gut feelings, you are just walking into Collegeboard's trap. The correct way
to guess is to first eliminate the answer choices that you're absolutely sure are wrong, and then pick
a choice randomly from the remaining choices. Do not think. Have a strategy like you'll always pick
the first one or you'll always pick the last one or you'll always pick the middle one and stick to it.
Remember, the laws of probability only work as long as the choices are random.

Reading Comprehension:

Now this is the tougher part of Critical Reading. Listen carefully:

Somewhere along my preparations, I realized that every question on SAT has one correct answer
and four definitely wrong answer. Now this is an important realization, because there were many
cases where I answered D but the correct answer was C and I wanted to argue, "Hey, D makes
sense too! SAT is just SO arbitrary." My score failed to improve as long as I kept thinking like that,
and the situation changed only when I finally convinced myself that I was really wrong when picked
D, and I understood why I was wrong.

I digress again here, but only because it's so important that you understand this. When Collegeboard
makes an SAT question, they have to make sure that there is never any ambiguity about the correct
answer. In other words, there can be no doubt whatsoever that C is correct, and what is more
important, A, B, D, and E are incorrect. Why? Because if someone ever claimed that their answer
was more correct that Collegeboard's, they could sue them and Collegeboard would have to fight an
annoying lawsuit and may even have to pay millions of dollar in compensation if they're proved
wrong by experts. That is why, although many questions in the reading comprehension section
sound subjective on the surface (e.g- "What did the author mean in line 81?"), they're really not.
Even if you may disagree about the correctness of C, if you think logically, you will have no doubts
about the incorrectness of A, B, D, and E.

Now when you understand what I'm trying to say here you'll understand that it's suicidal to practice
reading comprehension question from any other sources other than the Collegeboard itself. Barron's
and Princeton Review simply do not have the impetus to make their questions so perfect, so
fool-proof. You'll often encounter questions where you'll never understood why the answer is D and
not C. What then usually happens is you start making up some sort of bad explanations. And once
you damage your reasoning capability, you guarantee a low score in Critical Reading.
So what are you supposed to do? Practice only with questions made by Collegeboard. Where do
you get questions made by collegeboard? The best source is to buy the official SAT Study Guide by
Collegeboard (The book with the blue cover). You can download the explanations of all the Study
guide questions here: http://www.mediafire.com/?t2qcnpf3f83b3ik

The file that you download here also contains a book called Grammatix SAT Strategy Guide. This is
a really cool book and I highly recommend you read it.

After you do a critical reading section, please look up the explanations of all the questions. This is
important: Do not search explanations for only the questions that you got wrong; make sure you also
look at the explanations of the questions you got right. Remember, you are learning how to reason
here. You are learning the logical line of thinking you must follow to hack the SAT system. And it
takes time. It takes months of practice. It takes patience. The explanation files I gave have thorough
and detailed explanations, and you will learn a lot if you can work through them.

After you run out of these tests, you can search for more online. It is illegal for me to provide you
these tests here, but if you look hard enough on the Internet, you'll find them somewhere.

After you've reached the stage where you can see the answer of a question and understand why the
answer is correct, you can move on to optimizing your test-taking strategies. I always felt there was
never enough time for the Critical Reading section, especially when I was doing the double
passages, or the really long passages. I suggest you read plenty of SAT strategy book like Barron's
or Princeton Review or Kaplan and see what tricks they can teach you. (Remember, it's alright to
learn strategies from these books; just don't do practice questions from them.) I used to first read the
small blurb of text in the beginning (the part about the author and where the passage was published)
and them quickly skip through the questions and find mentions of line numbers. I then drew small
lines beside those lines in the passage, and when I started reading the passage I would slow down
whenever I approached these small lines, read the part and then answer the corresponding line
reference questions. After I was done answering these questions, I would go back and answer
global questions like "What does the passage primarily concern?" or "Which of the following
statements do you think the author would agree to?"

Again, these strategies were only personal strategies to save time. I suggest you look around the
Internet and read a lot of books (Barron's SAT 2400 had some awesome advice) and find the
strategy that works best for you. I found these advice threads particularly useful; you can take a look:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/750399-how-attack-sat-critical-reading-section-effe
ctively.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36528170/Xiggi-Advice (Not explicitly about Critical Reading but has
some good general advice.)

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/955109-silverturtles-guide-sat-admissions-success
.html (A somewhat "scholarly" post on SAT and US Admissions system.)

I conclude this post by disclosing the biggest secret of success in SAT: Practice. You can know all
the tactics and strategies of Messi, but that won't make you play like him.

If you have more questions, please ask in the comments section below.